Small Business, Who are we?

Recently I was in Sydney visiting my family. You see Dad’s about to turn 80 and we had an early 80^th for him. Getting back to where you came from is always exciting, catching up with family and friends can be great (generally is) and yet it can also be really busy. As an example… We landed in Sydney at lunchtime Friday and caught up with Mum, Dad and my sister.  After lunch, it was now about 3:30 we needed to get to the northern beaches of Sydney to catch up with some hospitable friends. Managing to navigate the maze of toll roads (see it’s not just Brisbane) to get through to North Sydney and onward, getting there in time for Friday afternoon drinks… And then dinner…

The weekend continued in similar fashion, more friends, family and locations, we travelled over 300 km and ate and shared a couple of drinks along the way. From the Northern Beaches of Sydney right down to Wollongong.

Hectic yes: Satisfying absolutely!

You see, catching up with family and friends is one of the joys of life.  The closeness we feel to others is what makes life worth living (for me anyway). Time and time again, it’s proven that business is the same. When you grow your business through building relationships, the growth is sustainable and ongoing.

Growing your small business through relationships can also be a lot of fun. I really enjoy turning up to a networking event and bumping into someone unexpected.  Making new friends and colleagues and commencing those new relationships.  But it wasn’t always like that. In the early days I didn’t know anyone and that started out intimidating. Yes, intimidating, turning up somewhere and not knowing anyone. Over the last year, it’s been less intimidating as I’ve got to know more owners and organisers of the networks.

Trying to grow your small business in a simply transactional environment, one where a sale is just a sale, nothing more and next time it’s all open again is challenging. Particularly for Small Business owners.  For BIG business, they have the opportunity to advertise to grow their customer base, many small business don’t have the same kinds of advertising budgets.

So if I was to ask you, how would you rather grow your business, through building relationships or through buying customers simply by advertising? What would be the answer?

And then it struck me, I’ve been working hard, really hard and focussed on building the Brisbane Small Business Community for more than 12 months. Yet we know so little about each other. I’ve been offering events, yet only a few have showed up.  Maybe we’re putting on the wrong events. maybe Brisbane Small Business needs something different.

It’s taken a while and finally I see the natural thing would be for us all to get to know each other and the group as a whole better. We can then start working out how we can help each other better.

Here is a link to the Survey

Brisbane Small Business owners, here is a deal, no strings attached.  I’ll get a survey started and share the results.  Together, we’ll find out more about each other and through this we’ll start to see how we can help each other grow.

After all, isn’t growing our business in a sustainable and balanced way is the key to ongoing success, profits and enjoying a more fulfilling life with time for family and friends.

To kick us off I’ve just 7 questions, all multiple choice and this is just enough to get us started, on the right track and finding out a little more about our community.  It’ll take only a couple of minutes to complete.  Its on Survey Monkey and all responses will be anonymous.

Next week we can share some insights from the responses and hopefully this will help us in building stuff that the group will love.

As the group grows we can even do it again and start to track the group, find out what people want and then offer that.

 

I’ll get back to you with the results.

 

Kevin.

 

PS: do it now and I’ll have time to write something interesting for next week.

Go on just complete the survey.  You know you want to hear who else is in the group.

If you’d like to ask me anything about this or about growing your business, don’t hesitate to call.